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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8188391" data-attributes="member: 42582">In my play experience, AD&D exhibited the first of your two features but in a different way from 3E: at mid-to-high levels spell users outstripped non-spell-users, but the system mastery that helped produce this outcome was spell load-out selection, and selection of which spell to use when.A more 3E-style of system mastery emerged in late 2nd ed AD&D played with Player's Option-type PC design. I remember building a cleric that to me seemed pretty good. In the first session there was a fight, and it turned out that my cleric was a better fighter than any (perhaps all combined!) of the three fighters in the party. Because this was a club game, we had built our PCs separately and I didn't know those fighter players outside of the context of the game, and so it wasn't until play got going that I learned that they didn't know how to build their PCs. Once I got to know one of those players fairly well, at his request I taught him about points-based PC building. He was able to significantly strengthen his PCs' effectiveness as a result.In Rolemaster, which I was playing around the same time, we also found a caster/non-caster imbalance, driven mostly by a fairly ubiquitous item in the system, the power-point multiplier. In our first long campaign, this resolved itself by all the players gradually drifting to caster builds. In our second long campaign we dropped/revised some of the spell-lists (especially teleportation and predicting the future) and dropped multipliers. The result was that we had two viable non-caster characters (though one picked up a few low-level Mentalism spells once he reached c 20th level) and three viable semi-casters all the way through to 27th (or thereabouts) level. One of the fighters was manifestly better at fighting than the other, but not in virtue of any "trap" choices: the player of the other fighter deliberately included other elements into his build (crafting, social, athletics) so that his PC could do other stuff.I don't play RM these days, and probably won't again - it requires time and patience that I no longer have. Part of the required patience pertains to PC build. But generally it does what it says on the tin. I don't think it's likely to produce a situation where one player sets out to build a cleric, the other sets out to build a fighter, and due to disparate skill at selecting from the build options the first player's cleric is not only perfectly viable in that respect but also out-classes the fighter.My most recent experience of build disparity has been a bit different. In our <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/middle-earth-lotr-rpging-using-cortex-heroic.670013/" target="_blank">Cortex+ LotR/MERP game</a>, Gandalf's player has the most mechanically powerful options, but these are counterbalanced by an increased propensity to grow the Doom Pool when they are used. The times when that player has cut loose, the result has been that the immediate opposition is defeated, but the Doom Pool has grown to 2d12 which as GM has allowed me to end the Scene, preventing the PCs from getting the overall goal that they want (recovery of a stolen palantir from some Orcs). There's a sense in which that's balanced, but it tends to give Gandalf's player a greater degree of control over the trajectory of play than the other players. This is probably true to the source material!, but equally probably isn't ideal for RPGing. The system has ways to handle this - the other players could try and persuade Gandalf to stay true to his mission, which in mechanical terms could place debuffs on him to cut loose - but that (i) requires a degree of system insight and (ii) a willingness to depart from some of the traditional conventions of party play.In classic D&D party play, at least as presented by Gygax in his rulebooks, there is a degree of tension between the cooperative element - which is undermined by extreme build disparities - and the competitive element, which might allow an individual player to earn more XP or just to more strongly shape the dynamic of party choices. But as probably many of us have experienced, there is some risk here if the tension leads to something snapping! My LotR game has a bit of the same risk because of the Gandalf element.My feeling is that 3E seems to ratchet up this tension, and hence the possibility of something snapping in the absence of very strong GM curation/force.</blockquote>

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